Thesavannahs and grasslands of Northern Tanzania are one of the world’s most spectacular landscapes. Our human origins lie in these landscapes, and today the region is home to large mammals that have mostly disappeared from other parts of Africa and the world at large.

​The region has also served as a crossroads for different cultures and ethnic groups since time immemorial. Many of these groups continue to depend on the lands and natural resources that they have utilized for centuries, and for some many thousands of years. In turn these landscapes have shaped their cultures and ways of life. Conservation and environmental stewardship are fundamental aspects of traditional life and essential for its prosperity, which is why community-driven development and sustainable natural resource management must remain indivisible in any long-term visions or strategies for collective rangeland governance.

The last 120 years have been particularly challenging for rural communities in Tanzania. The policies of both colonial and post-independence governments have shifted land and natural resources from local to national control. As a result, the autonomy of traditional institutions has been eroded, while incentives for sustainable use and management have lessened in their effectiveness to mobilize communities.

In the 1980's, a tourism company called Dorobo Tours, headed by three Tanzanian-born American brothers - Daudi, Thad and Mike Peterson - had become increasingly concerned by the spread of agriculture, a rise in charcoal burning, and the loss of wildlife habitat throughout the region. In response, Dorobo Tours initiated what were among the first tourism agreements with several villages in Ngorongoro and Simanjiro Districts. These agreements provided communities income on a contractual basis from tourism in exchange for their setting aside and management of village lands for wildlife and wildlife-compatible uses.

The Peterson brothers also became involved in laying the groundwork of several projects aimed at facilitating land use planning in an effort to enable communities to establish a balance between agriculture and pastoralism, and to limit uncontrolled charcoal production and other destructive activities. By the mid-1990’s, the Peterson brothers realized that a new community-based organization was needed to help local communities address these resource management and governance issues. Several local activists from the Loliondo area of Ngorongoro District with firm roots in these communities and extensive experience in local development processes joined together to form Ujamaa-CRT. The Dorobo Fund for Tanzania, a United States-recognized 501 (c) 3 non-profit, was also founded to channel philanthropic donations to what was then the Ujamaa Community Resource Trust in Tanzania.​Today, the Dorobo Fund remains an important player in our financial portfolio; however, our success at the grassroots level has attracted support from a number of different sources, including the Wildlife Conservation Society of New York and Oxfam. Our donors have a variety of special interests, such as wildlife conservation, social justice, and activism, reflecting our ability to integrate sociocultural, economic and ecological spheres into a holistic strategy.

From 1997 until 2002, Ujamaa-CRT worked under the auspices of another local NGO, the Tazama Community Resource Team. In 2003, our organisation was formally registered as a trust with its own board of directors under the name Ujamaa Community Resource Trust. Later, in 2010, we re-registered as a non-profit Company by Limited Guarantee under its current name, the Ujamaa Community Resource Team.